1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to an image forming apparatus, an image forming method, and an integrated circuit.
2. Description of the Related Art
There has been a known an image forming apparatus that includes, for example, not only toner cartridges for general colors such cyan (C), magenta (M), yellow (Y), and black (K) colors but also a toner cartridge exclusively used for forming a background image in a woven pattern and a cartridge for transparent color toner to be applied for glossy finish.
Here, a fine gradation expression in video data forming a woven pattern image or the like may be less necessary than in video data forming a general color image. Therefore, the gradation in video data for a woven pattern image may be provided in a manner that the gradation in the video data for the woven pattern image is different from that in video data for general color images. Some of the reasons of this are to save memory capacity and improve performance of data transfer in a controller.
In such a case, to prevent the quality degradation of an output image, there is a known technique in which a woven pattern image of binary image data and an original picture image of multi-valued image data are combined by controlling a total toner amount (see, for example, Japanese Laid-open Patent Publication No. 2011-139292).